It is well known in the art to broadcast a sporting event by positioning a plurality of television cameras at suitable locations, providing feeds from those cameras to announcers in a broadcast booth, replaying certain plays from the event so that the announcers might make a comment about those plays, and finally transmitting the entire telecast to the viewing audience. However, this conventional broadcasting approach suffers from several shortcomings.
First, the quality of the broadcast suffers if the cameras are not wisely positioned relative to the playing field or if there are simply too few cameras to cover the field adequately. Thereby causing certain plays in certain parts of the field to be missed or inadequately covered.
Second, although some conventional television cameras are somewhat mobile, the placement of the cameras around the playing field is essentially fixed and static. However, the movement of the game ball and players on the field is dynamic and unpredictable. Thus, during a game, the statically-placed cameras often fall to provide a view from a critical angle, or the cameras' views are obstructed by player or officials. For example, stationary field cameras routinely fail to provide close-up views of baseball runners sliding into bases to avoid tags, of running backs fumbling before or after their knees touch the ground, or of wide receivers attempting to place both feet in bounds after catching a pass.
Third, conventional cameras generally are not placed within the actual playing field during games. Auto racing is one notable exception; in-car cameras have revolutionized racing broadcasts and have sparked fan interest in the sport. However, for other sporting events, such as football, on-field cameras mounted in helmets or other sporting equipment do not yet enjoy wide spread use. Thus, remote field cameras must record the action from relatively distant vantage points with indirect views.
Fourth, the color commentators in the broadcast booth must make do with the video prerecorded by the field cameras, whether or not video is useful. The commentators cannot reposition the cameras dynamically to record the action from another viewpoint. Thus, the commentators are restricted to static video images and cannot alter the viewpoints from which the video is recorded. Also, with the increased use of instant-replay officiating by major professional sports leagues, the vantage points of instant replays are becoming more and more critical.
Some attempts have been made previously to provide real time acquisition and processing of the physical positions of sports players and targeted sporting equipment, such as playing balls. For example, Daver, U.S. Pat. No. 5,513,854, discloses a system for real time acquisition of persons in motion, and Larsen, U.S. Pat. No. 5,363,297, discloses an automated camera tracking system for sporting events. However, neither of these systems teaches a single system for tracking individual sports players and sporting equipment in real time, using the tracking data to generate simulated images based upon processed values, and integrating the simulated figures into a virtual sporting environment which is updated in real time to represent the original sporting event.
Therefore, the deficiencies in the sporting industry and failures in prior systems to solve the need for generating virtual views of sporting events motivated the instant invention.